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Just my 2 ct... wouldn't it be best to chose the one your OS admin people are most happy with? From my experience I'd chose among AIX, Windows and Solaris which are useable and I'd forget about the rest. HP-UX is too exotic, Z is too slow (and overall too expensive) and Linux tends to become a "software chaos and you" workshop the minute you hit production reality. But between Windows, Solaris and AIX there's little enough difference to decide based upon external factors.

I don't know exactly "why". IBM told us it had to do with networking (tcp/ip) more than anything else. We had a rather big Z which, after all the serious applications moved to unix, did practically nothing but tsm and would still not scale beyond an aggregated 60 MB/s performance despite 4 GBit Adapters (that was on a previous job and I don't know the details of the Z, but it was a biggy). A single p4 (costing overall less than the adapters on the Z alone) then carried the entire workload with just a double GB channel that constantly scraped along at 160 MB/s speed using the same tape and disk hardware. In those days I wasn't close enough to the subject to analyse anything on my own - but the performance difference was truely remarkable. I wouldn't have given a statement like that if it wasn't for probably 90% of my colleagues from other large european companies - which we regularly see at guide meetings - making similar remarks on the subject.

Hands Down AIX Is The Best! No question! The problem with Windows is the I/O backplane will never be as good as Unix. As for the Unix's out there....SUN is horrible when it comes to it's I/O backplane and the move to AMD made it a little better but no where near IBM's P series. I would not consider HP just for some of it's issues with dynamic drivers. Many times a reboot is required and I have yet to find a command like AIX's lscfg -vp on HPUX (If anyone knows of one please let me know). This command is a godsend when it comes to setting up LAN-Free connections. As for Linux as PJ said its a driver/hardware nightmare. We had a situation where the Linux we had installed supported the RAID controller but not the library. So we went to the newer version that supported the library and then it turned out the RAID controller was not supported. NIGHTMARE!

I have to agree that AIX is the best platform for TSM. If not only for the reasons below but Vendor Support also makes this a good choice to avoid finger pointing ( which honostly my experience with Tivoli support has been very good )

If your definition of "server free" is that a filesystem is backed up online from another machine than the client itself, then "server free" is working with TSM servers on Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris and HP-UX.

Rebuilding a server from scratch in DR is straightfoward despite a complete change of hardware and firmware levels. In fact we've just come out of DR testing using H80 hardware vs my p615 in prod. Just make sure you have a recent AIX CD/DVD handy at DR to match with your system backup (mksysb).

I still chortle watching the Wintel guys tap-dance around trying to get their Dell based system images work on Compaq gear during DR (yes they are working on it).

The hardware has come down a lot with some of the new "little" servers like the P520. I'm happily running on a p615 in production with 8GB memory, dual cpu, StorageTek/SUN L80 library with a pair of LTO3 drives (SCSI3) and 1.5TB of disk storage pool area.

The price point of a p55A server loaded up with 12GB of memory, 2x fibre, 2 cpu and even the rack thrown in comes pretty darn close to a Quad Xeon Dell server. In our TSM environment the p55A would be overkill.

One thing to watch out for is the number of 64bit cards your chassis can handle. My poor little p615 can only take 4 (2x fibre, 2x gigabit). Yes you can get expansion drawers but they are a significant expense. Better to ensure you have slots to spare up front for later expansion of your library by picking a the right sized server to start with.

I have some experience with a few of the platforms. One benefit we find from using TSM on MVS is the way we are able to leverage the very reliable z/OS hardware and operating system when there is a lower demand. We use to do a lot of night/evening batch work on our MVS system. Now that users are demanding (not needing, but just expecting) all reports in "real time" (even if they don't ever read them), we have a very good machine that is underutilized. TSM takes advantage of this time to perform the bulk of its work.

Another advantage of MVS is that the OS handles the allocation of tape drives. We are easily able to keep our tape drives busy with TSM, yet have them available for other MVS workloads as needed.